Imran Khan’s OBL, the martyr | Talat Hussain

 

Syed Talat Hussain

 

When the Pakistan Foreign Office was crafting a stern response to the State Department’s 2019 report on terrorism that devalued Pakistan’s efforts to fight the threat internally and globally, there was some debate on how Delhi might exploit both the unflattering report and Pakistan’s retort. No one had imagined, however, that the challenge to their stance would come not from Delhi and Washington, but from their own prime minister. But that is exactly what happened.

There is every possibility that none of the 388-words of the foreign office press release that listed several steps the nation had taken in fighting terrorism, had passed Prime Minister Imran’s notice. And this wasn't because he was making a rare appearance in the parliament when the press release was issued and was busy. PM Imran has a hyperactive phone and reads the communication of his liking even in the middle of the night. But for serious documents, he does not have the time. So even if had got hold of the press release this would not have mattered much.  After all, this was not a favourite subject: gossipy snippets (often out of context), short versions of short statements about himself and, yes, juicy intelligence reports on who is talking to whom and saying what. Also, for official work he has an I-theory: ‘I’ know everything.

So when he called Osama bin Laden a martyr in a speech that was being broadcast live, the foreign office was stunned and baffled. The prime minister however was not. He did not even know the maelstrom of lasting embarrassment he had created for the country and for his own government. Nor was he corrected by the foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, who was sitting right next to him. (In a compounding act of policy insanity Mr Qureshi later defended his leader’s speech saying it was ‘great’).

So it came to this: just hours after the foreign office was heard expressing disappointment with the State Department’s annual report, because it did not give Pakistan enough credit nor looked at Islamabad’s various steps to block terrorist financing, Pakistan’s prime minister was pinning the revered badge of martyrdom on OBL, also suggesting, scandalously, that 10b dollars are laundered out of Pakistan. The supreme irony was that in citing the fictional 10b dollar figure he referred to a State Department report!

To be sure, Islamabad’s official position has been that the dead man was the world’s number 1 terrorist. That he was killed in stealth by the US leaving Pakistan’s entire state structure swooning in shame and seething with anger is an ongoing matter but one that has lost relevance and centrality.

Imran Khan has been consistent in his stance on Osama bin Laden. Today in the assembly where he called him a martyr was no slip of the tongue. pic.twitter.com/kP4ydf0KVX

— Syed Talat Hussain (@TalatHussain12) June 25, 2020

However, on occasions when diplomats and military officials run short of arguments, they do mention that it was Pakistan’s initial intelligence that had given the Americans the main lead to get OBL.

And though he might not remember this, PM Imran himself had reiterated Pakistan’s contribution to capturing OBL during his visit to the US in an interview with Fox news. He said: “….it was the ISI that gave the information which led to the location of Osama bin Laden…If you ask CIA it was the ISI that gave the initial location through the phone connection…” This was because before he left for the visit, his detailed briefing from the military included these lines. (Even though he eliminated a few years between this intelligence cooperation and OBL capture. The intelligence lead PM Khan was cashing in Washington was years before the Abbottabad Operation.)

In Washington, PM Imran could say this also because he was trying to earn brownie points with the Trump Administration apart from faking bonding with Kushner and feigning personal chemistry with Donald ladies.

But yesterday it was a complete U-turn on the official narrative that he diligently parroted in the US. His media-media managers are now trying to spin it for him but the spin is hopelessly ineffective. After all it was not a slip of the tongue. After having used the word “killing”, he corrected himself and selected “martyred” instead. “He used the word kill twice…”, said another spin doctor.  So Osama was killed “twice” and “martyred” once all in a space of four sentences.

Does the PM not know the simple formulation of the state’s standard policy? If he does, he does not remember it, which allows his internal contradictions to come out and command his tongue.

Moreover, he has little understanding of the context of what he says, which are just words he chooses to spew depending on the mood he is in. In the same speech yesterday, he quoted the demise of the Byzantine Empire 700 years earlier than when it actually happened and eliminated from the record half a dozen Mughal emperors. This was a replay of the past when he had joined Germany’s borders with Japan, had lamented that the annals of history had very limited references to Jesus, attributed a poem to the national poet Allama Muhammad Iqbal which he had never penned. The list of dim, dum dum bloopers is endless.

But this one has implications. It has given Pakistan’s detractors, Delhi in lead, a long stick to beat the country on an issue that Islamabad has tried very hard to bury with tough actions and much sacrifice. It has re-opened the debate about OBL’s status inside the country where his votaries find sustenance from such narratives, and---this is the worst--- it has insulted the memory of those who died fighting al-Qaeda and its affiliates in Pakistan or were victims of terror, meaning the real martyrs: people, children, men, women, soldiers, and policemen. Above all else, it shows which side of history the country’s prime minister wants to stand when it comes to Pakistan’s hard-earned victory against organized terror.

Perhaps next time someone should send a press release to PM Khan as well saying, “Pakistan hopes that future statements willfully acknowledge the entire spectrum of Pakistan’s counter-terrorism efforts and present a fair and correct perspective of this global threat.”